>> Perhaps you are sanguine about another intrusion by the government ... I am not ...
No need to be preachy and suggest I’m indifferent to Liberty. That’s quite a stretch given my rather inert remark.
The treatment of the unborn is subjective in the courts as one could legally kill the child through abortion and another prosecuted for man-slaughter or murder as the result of an assault on the woman carrying the child. The unborn is considered a ‘person’ in the latter case.
Again, I stated the ‘goal’ and not the ‘intent’. Your remarks address the potential abuse of such an initiative which would be far less harmful to the unborn than the act of an abortion. No less the politics that enable death by syringe can certainly come to the aid of those concerned with death by twinkie. I don’t find passage through the vaginal canal the determining characteristic that differentiates the life value of the unborn from that of the newborn. Why should “Life, liberty, equality of justice and the due process of law” be governed by the act of birthing? Are you saying that a 9 month prenatal is undeserving of the rights afforded to a newborn yet detached from its mother?
Absolutely not. But I AM saying that tangential means of achieving a desired end have the greatest potential for boomeranging and causing far more damage than good, especially with our courts as currently constituted. And sorry, I did not mean to sound preachy, and certainly did not mean to call into question your love of liberty.
Just please consider one example: the civil rights acts of the mid-60s. They explicitly state that discrimination based on race, etc., is impermissible...period, no exceptions, no ambiguous language. Moreover, the legislative history is replete with statements by the bills' sponsors that the laws could never result in, for example, reverse discrimination to redress historical discrimination - the legislative debate went into exhaustive detail on this very point. It took but one decision authored by Brennan in, IIRC, 1968, to read the clear mandates of the laws (and their stated goals, intent, and operation) completely out of existence. You see the result today everywhere you look...and I don't know your thoughts on the issue, but I perceive it to be an unmitigated...sorry to use this word yet again, but nothing else is strong enough...disaster. The purely "good" goals and intent of the law, and its clear statutory language, has been manipulated by the far left to engineer results completely at odds with its intent.
Please also consider that the same formal legal reasoning used in Brennan's opinion was employed by Blackmun in Roe v. Wade and the associated case, Doe v. Bolton, scant years later...resulting in the second Holocaust of the 20th century.
When considering legislation, deep analysis, well beyond thinking "it's the good and right thing to do, so let's do it" sort, must be applied. The mere use in the initiative of the legal term of art, "due process of law," sent shivers down my back - as much evil has marched under the banner of those three little words, under current judicial usage, more than I would think possible in a rational world. Utilising "bad" means to achieve a "good" end is NEVER wise - and in my estimation, this initiative is such a "bad" means because it is clearly foreseeable that it will result in unintended and highly negative consequences far afield from the stated goals.
I support the goal of protecting the unborn...but this is not the proper means to achieve that goal. I would rather say "Beware!" now than "I told you so!" later.